Gather 'round me, children, and a story I will tell. Actually, it's a story about stories. Well, it's not so much a story as a review of a game about stories and storytellers. In this case, it's the latest from Pastel Games, a bit of short point-and-click fiction called The Trader of Stories: Bell's Heart. In Trader of Stories you take control of Myosotis, a barterer of tales, if you will, who's on her way to a place called The Cradle. Unfortunately, her wagon wheel breaks and she has to go into a small town to get it fixed. Of course, it won't be that easy. It turns out you don't have enough acorns, which are the local currency, to get your your wheel re-wrought. Looks like you're going to have to do some pointing and clicking.

Bell's Heart has all the usual makings of a point-and-click adventure. You'll use your mouse to interact with objects and people and also to help you navigate your way through the game. The most noticeable difference is your book of stories. As you make your way through the game you'll learn bits and pieces of the tragic tale of a local man named Derrida. Every time you hear more of the story, you'll get a note on one page of your book and a part of the picture on the opposite page. Along with fixing your wagon wheel, writing down the story of Derrida is your goal.

Analysis: If you're familiar with Pastel Games this won't come as any surprise to you because, as we've come to expect from them, this game looks and plays beautifully. Every area is lovingly drawn and detailed, the characters are just as well crafted with their unique looks and designs that ooze personality. This might be Pastel's best looking game to date, but since the style tends to change with each game that's an unfair call to make. On the audio front, the music wasn't really my thing, but I can't deny that it was very well done. Just a note, to fiddle with audio and quality options, you can right click on the game at any time to bring up those options.

"The narrative unfolds beautifully no matter what order you work out the clues. Add [this] to the tiny list of games that successfully play with narrative." -Shudog

The gameplay is pretty much standard point-and-click fare. The book of stories is a nice touch and while it doesn't add a whole lot of variety to the genre it is a lot of fun to watch the story come together. One element that might go unappreciated is the signpost tree. Sometimes in point-and-clicks navigation can be really big pain. It can be confusing as to which way you're going or, if the world is big enough, you can get lost. Trader of Stories simplifies all this while still having a nice amount of areas. To get to an area just click on the appropriate sign on the signpost. You'll still get to explore the areas, which aren't that big, but usually have some off-shoots to check out, and it cuts way down on back tracking.

Trader of Stories: Bell Heart is the first game in the Rudowski brothers' Big Old Tree that Dreams series of games, and it's a great example of a strange, new and wonderful looking world that really draws you in. You want to know more about characters and spend long amounts of time in their world. Unfortunately, the game also tends to feel a bit too short, like getting woken up during the best part of a dream. Bell's Heart is also pretty easy, which doesn't help the length but does help the atmosphere. You'll breeze through it and get to soak in the sights without suffering from frustration induced myopia. In the end you'll want more. More stories to collect, more people to meet, more strange creatures and locations. We'll just have to hope for more.

Click the stone, when the screen changes, click it again, go back to the original screen.

Click the copse of trees to the right.

Forest

Click the tree without any ribbons on it.

Click on the bell clapper strapped to the tree. Go back.

Go back to the outskirts, then proceed toward the towns.

Run Down House

Click on the house.

Click on the cat.

Click on the paper on the ground. Click it again when it's in your hand.

Go back, go towards town.

Center of Town

Click on the ladies on the ladies by the well.

Click the horseshoe on the sign post.

Stable

Talk to the woman leaning against the wall.

Ask the woman about Derrida

Return to the signpost tree and go to the next location

Forge

Click on blacksmith

Give broken wheel to the smith.

Ask the smith about Derrida

Go back, click on the house on the hill

Combine the bell clapper with the bell, click the complete bell

Go inside

Old Woman's Home

Grab the amulet on the left hand table

Grab the pot to the left of Myosotis

Talk to the woman, then ask her about Derrida

Go back to signpost, go to next area

Wayside Inn

Grab the pile of acorns on the right side of the round

Click on the cart down the road

Talk to the merchant, then talk to him again to buy the two recipes

Go back, enter the inn

Grab the flint on the table to the left

Click the drunk

Click the bartender

Talk to him, then ask him about Derrida

Grab the bottle above the bartender's head

Click the curtain to the side of the bartender

Click a bottle of wine, buy it

Leave, go back to the signpost, go to the town hall

Town Hall

Click the door up the stairs to the right

Talk to the mayor, then go back and ask him about Derrida

Go back, then click on the door to the left, then click on the waterfall in the distance

Click on a lily pad

Go back to the signpost, go to the rundown house

Run Down House

Go insde

Use flint on the tinder in the oven

Place pot on oven

Put flower, drunkard's hair and amulet in the pot IN THAT ORDER

Put cat's fur, lily pad and wine in the pot IN THAT ORDER, then use the empty bottle on the pot

Go back to the Wayside Inn

Wayside Inn

Go inside, use the amulet on the drunk

Go back to the stables

Stables

Give the drunk to the woman

Go back to the waterfall

Waterfall

Use potion on water

Talk to Derrida

Return to the mayor, give him the story of Derrida

Finishing Up

Go to the forge, buy back your wheel

Go back to your wagon and use the wheel on the wagon

Posted by:
Brad |
October 1, 2010 1:43 PM

All right, since people still seem to be having trouble I'll outline where you get every piece. This guide will go from the TOP DOWN and from LEFT TO RIGHT. So, if I say "third row, third space," that means the third row from the top and three spaces over.

1. I couldn't read the story all the way through after i'd finished. Couldn't scroll through it all and just got the first part.
2.

After telling the mayor the story and completing the game I went to a couple of places before leaving, like the undecorated tree. I accidently got 3x D's story and couldn't go back to the mayor. And the icon was in the same place that the fixed wheel was so I had to jiggle for ages to get around picking up the story and somehow get the wheel.

On the site you guys linked to, it loaded instantaneously, and when I hit play, it goes back to the loading screen with play. Kept hitting play with no result.

[Try disabling your browser extensions and/or update your Flash Player. There is likely a conflict with your setup. Also, rights to the game were purchased by Games Nitro, which is the sponsor. That's why we linked to that site. -Jay]

Im desperate to play this game but it just wont work, I cant get past the first screen! I give Zephyr the food and it keeps telling me I have to feed him before moving on, its so frustrating! Ive cleared my cookies and have the newish flash player so I dont understand why its not working :(

[There is no point in clearing cookies with Flash games. Flash games don't use cookies. If you give the bag of food to Zephr and he eats it but the game doesn't let you move on, then try clearing your cache (not the same as cookies) and reloading the game and start again. I hope that helps! -Jay]

Lovely game, though I had the same scrolling bug as a couple of other people. If the arrows in the scrollbar don't work, you may be able to read everything by manually dragging the scroll box up and down.

Aside from that, the only other problems I had were occasional English errors -- the writing is generally good but sometimes it's clear that the writer isn't a native speaker. But again, lovely, and I especially like the way it gives a sense of a larger world -- especially because it means we'll probably get sequels!

The signpost was great too; sometimes navigation can be needlessly obscure in Pastel games, but this worked like a charm.

Ok, I know this isn't a help forum for technical issues, but I have been having some problems with the flash player for the last few days playing games here. I had an update recently so I guess it started after the last update. Anyway, my problem is that when I play flash games now, the game is larger than the screen that it is displayed on. Sometimes I can right click and click 'show all' and that fixes the problem, but when I went to play this game, right click didn't give me the option and I got to a scene in the intro that I couldn't see a next icon.... Any help or suggestions? Thanks in advance... I'd like to give this game a try if I can see it properly...

[It's kind of strange that this problem has come up several times recently by different people. I've created an FAQ on our Support Page for problems and issues like this. I think your issue of "flash games too large" is due to a zoomed browser. Check for the solution there. I hope that helps! :) -Jay]

Lovely story and pretty fun.. only problem I had, was that I had to make the amulet of power before I could make the potion to summon the drowned, even tho I had all the stuff for both of them. Was there a reason for doing it that way that I perhaps missed?

Just a gorgeous game. The one point I wasn't sure about was collecting the potion ingredients before getting the recipe. I didn't know why my character would want to carry around cat fur and a bell pull. I also wish it had been a bit more challenging. The "questing" atmosphere of the game was canceled out a bit when I stumbled upon many of the clues by accident.

Mateusz and Pastel Games just keep soaring higher and higher into artistry. A story about a traveling collector of stories....fantastic! The music was just great and relaxing, the story and characters, poignant and memorable,the landscapes utterly breathtaking,. Mateusz is truely the Miyazaki of point and click games can't wait for this story to continue!

What perhaps hasn't been noted ... the narrative unfolds beautifully no matter what order you work out the clues. There's only one paragraph that doesn't quite make sense. Small detail, as the art, the corresponding clue, and the text all lock together in an interesting way.

I just want to say that I'm glad everyone's digging this game as much as I did. Every game I review are games I enjoyed, but this one really bowled me over. It's nice to know other folks appreciate it as much as I did.

Definitely some technical problems with this game. The biggest one (for me) is that the screens as designed are too tall for use on a netbook. In fact this is probably the tallest screen size I have seen on a flash game so far. Game designers need to keep in mind how many people use netbooks these days when setting up screen dimensions. Wider would have been much better than taller.

Like others I also had problems getting the PLAY button to work. Eventually I got it to work by using NOSCRIPT and blocking everything but the main website domain.

Wow, this is amazing! I am hypnotized by the very story and art! I though I already used to pastelgames awesomeness, now they surprise me with more awesomeness!

A bit of problem and bug found, the game height is slightly higher for my browser with just menu bar, navigation bar, tab bar, and the very bottom status bar. I have to disable my navigation bar to be able to read the texts on dialogues and items :/ . As the bug, I could get Derrida's story again after telling the story to mayor and go back to the waterfall-- though it doesn't seems to break anything.

I encountered the loading problem, too. I think there is just a goof up in the coding somewhere in its initialization. After ignoring it and looking at everything else on the page (my mind sometimes pretends to be a hummingbird mind), I clicked "Play" again and it continued normally. Just give the game a couple minutes by itself after it loads (I checked that my connection was idle to prove it stopped loading), and it should correct itself. I hope this helps.

Near the begining of the game I gave the wheel to the blacksmith. I didn't have money so he said to bring him some. After telling the story and reselling the recipes I returned to the forge to get the wheel. I then noticed the wheel wasn't in my inventory and assumed that the blacksmith had been keeping it for me. He didn't. What now?

Windows XP SP3, Firefox and adobe Flash player (I don't care much for the numbers, but they're all newest versions)

The JIG link doesn't work either.

[Try uninstalling Flash and reinstall. There are a huge number of issues being reported like this recently. I'm thinking it's probably due to Flash bugs (we've seen a lot of Flash Player updates since they reached 10.0). If that doesn't work, the other likely culprit is any browser extensions you may have installed (ad blockers are notorious for causing problems with Flash games). I just tried the game, both links, using Windows XP SP3, Firefox (3.6.8) and Flash (10.1.85.3) without any issues whatsoever. -Jay]

You get it by talking to the bartender, but not asking about Derrida. I went back to my old saves and could not talk to him having done everything else in the game, so that one at least needs to be done earlier then other things.

On one of my computers when I start a game I cannot get past the very beginning where you need to feed Zephyr. I feed him but still cannot leave. I just started it on a different computer and found that apparently I'm supposed to start with three items(book; acorns; notes). On the first computer I ended up starting with none of these items.

Wow, I feel really bad for thinking that this was enitirely a game from pastel. The true world and the makings of it belong to Mr. Rudowski! If you ever see this, I want to let you know that I think you truely have an artist's eye for scenes and storytelling, much like my favorite and possibley greatest anime director of all time, Hayao Miyazaki,have you heard of him? For anyone who wants to know more about him check his blog here. http://traderofstories.blogspot.com/

Umm, hi. I was playing this game on Kongregate, and I was stuck on the second half of the game, so then I came here. Anyways, this game has a badge that says "Complete Book of Stories". I have gotten everything in there. I'm confused. Is there anything I'm missing or something?

A gorgeously simple short game - perfect for a casual sit down. Don't have as much time as I'd like to play games, and when I started it I thought "oh no, this is going to consume me till I get it done!", but it was less than half an hour. PERFECT! Thank you for sharing.

ok so i followed the instructions, but the thing left a puzzle piece out. So i did it all over again and it still left a piece out but instead it was a different one this time. I have no clue why and i followed the directions ....:(

All right, since people still seem to be having trouble I'll outline where you get every piece. This guide will go from the TOP DOWN and from LEFT TO RIGHT. So, if I say "third row, third space," that means the third row from the top and three spaces over.

I'm not sure what I did wrong. I can't figure out how to give the story to the Mayor. I did everything else. When I click on the book of stories it just opens for me to read. I can't click the mayor anymore either. I wish I could finish!

If you truly did everything else there should be an item on your inventory bar that represents the completed story. You don't give him your book of stories, but rather that item. If I recall it's square and has Derrida's face on it.

Beautiful game, played it after A Grain of Truth. Thanks to JIG for letting us know of this series and other games like it (read through the comments). Also, I didn't encounter any bugs/glitches except some non-intuitive exit points for some scenes, but everything else was smooth and really impressive.

I thought I asked everybody about Derrida, and I definitely DID speak to everyone, but the top middle piece (bartender) didn't fill in and now, according to somebody's post above, it's no longer possible anymore.

This was already my second attempt because the first time through I didn't realize what

"Who's Derrida?"

was for until too late. *sigh*

Other than this, I want to call it a nice laid back game. Hahaha, well the concept, music, and unfolding of the story are really well done either way. :')

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